Edward Weston is alive and well

Okay, well, maybe just in my head.

Tower Real Estate

Many people are looking for real estate to purchase these days, whether it's their first home, an investment or a vacation property. I found many new multi-dwelling homes opening up right outside the tower where I work after recent rains. I was impressed by the many options available.

Here are apartments located in an industrial area. Very good rental property:

This one I'm saving for Jamie Schulte, who doesn't mind living in small studio apartments. Desert location, south-facing windows make it a good place to grow avocados and basil.

Comes furnished with a small upholstered ottoman.

Homes with large lots, good for gardening and sharing tools and tea and gossip with your neighbors on adjacent properties.

I think they did a lovely job with this remodel: I love the dusty browns of the exterior, don't you?

New parents: there are several playhouses on this property, and very nice high ceilings so you can have tall Christmas trees.

If you are looking for a property in a planned community, this would be your best bet.


An aerial view of the property gives you an idea of how spacious these lots are.
Here you see that you can easily move between the living-space and the outer cottage bedrooms without leaving the sheltering roof.

Reusing Tea Tins

I hate to throw away those nice little round tea tins, but haven't found them very useful for holding anything else since I can't ever tell what's inside... I finally figured out that you can just wrap them quickly in brown paper and then write what's inside and the date. Then when that stuff runs out, I can cross out the old writing and write something new. In this way I can use the same brown paper for years! Alternately you could use pretty paper to wrap them (wrapping paper, newspaper, art store paper...).

To do it quickly, I just rolled the tin along the edge of the paper and drew a little dot where I wanted to cut the paper. Then I used the book as a straight edge and connected the dots. I cut the paper and then used that as a template to cut a few more sheets. I used Scotch tape to attach.

Pear Tree Lamp.

Nick Foley created this amazing lamp. Each bulb is composed of LEDS, an autonomous charging ciruit and a rare earth magnet so that you can pick a 'pear' off the 'tree', and it will remain illuminated for up to an hour!

I'm not even much of a home-furnishings kind of person, (Arwen and Andrea hold down that fort!) but it is just such a delicious (erm, sorry) mix of technology and art and fantasy. If only things manufactured in the world were as (and more!) beautiful, useful, and environmentally of low impact, I would be very pleased. Sometimes I really do think that aesthetics are the way to go, for better or worse, in terms of getting people to make more sustainable choices...

Thanks to Phil at the makezine blog for pointing it out!

Already it is the Future!

Here is a wonderful old propaganda film by none other than General Electric from the Prelinger Archives depicting the history of electricity in the United States. A great study of propaganda in general and a frightening/inspiring look at what GE was trying to accomplish back in the day, including a list of modern household, agricultural and industrial innovations, and possible new realms of electricity generation (they mention that home atomic generators probably won't be developed and they talk about harnessing the energy of the sun through photosynthesis).

I wonder a bit about the significance of the fact that the word communism is never actually used, so that the freedom from tyranny line seemed to me to come out of left field with no overt enemy. I suppose back then it really wasn't necessary to spell it out, however. Everyone knew that it was the domino effect we were afraid of, but I think it's an interesting manifestation of the way the Cold War was fought, in this underhanded, irrational, unspoken kind of way.

Look! Already it is the Future! Here is greater freedom from drudgery than ever before! Today Freedom and Power are inextricably linked. But now our freedoms are threatened by forces that would crush our liberties and tyrannize the minds of men. Against these forces we have the weapons of Freedom, Courage, Faith and The Creative Spirit. And we have the tool that built our way of life: Productivity. With this productivity we can add to our freedoms and defend them (this is accompanied by an image of an infinite stream of war planes).

Double points if you decide to watch a newer piece of propaganda from the same company... Ah! The evolution of propaganda from the cosiness of your own Personal Computer.

Remembrance of Things Past

Conde Nast has done something quite wonderful: they're opening up the classic photo archive of House & Garden and selling the prints. While magazine photography has always been looked down upon by the art world, I've always been captivated by those glossy pages. And, in retrospect, the spreads are works of art; photographers like Andre Kertesz, Horst P. Horst and Cecil Beaton made their mark. Check out their store; it's like a who's who of classic design, with portraits of Aldous Huxley and Alfred Hitchcock, as well as shots of "An Elegant Tea" and "Leisure Furniture Heads for the Sun" (above). There's something absolutely magnificent about the head-on collision of dated parties and utterly timeless moments.

Clip-On Earrings

I have a ton of old clip-on earrings that I've either inherited from my great-grandmother or collected from junk sales (I can't shake the desire to be prepared for playing dress-up with ten-year-olds at a moment's notice). I recently came up with a new way to use them in the everyday, though. If you were giving someone money or just like to keep money in a drawer (I like to stash a little in case I can't get to an ATM) you can use clip-on earrings as a money clip. Depending on the sturdiness of the earrings, you can only do a few bills at once.